This invention relates to a letter segmenting apparatus for use in automatic character recognition known generally by the name of "optical" character recognition. The word "letter" may refer to a numeral, a symbol, a mark, or the like.
On recognizing by an automatic character recognition system a group of substantially aligned letters, for example, a word in a sentence or a number, it is necessary to supply a letter recognition unit of the system with signals representative of each letter. It is, however, not easy to segment two adjacent letters or to decide a dividing line therebetween, particularly when these letters are touching or partially merging with each other. Under the circumstances, a feature extraction scheme appears to be effective in theory. The device therefor, however, is complicated and is not operable at a high speed.